Kracauer (and Benjamin) on cinema and modernity

Elektronische Version der gedr. Ausg. 199

Gambling with the nation : heroines of the Japanese yakuza film, 1955–1975

A revamped period-drama film genre surfaced after the Allied occupation of Japan (1945–1952), featuring androgynous comic heroines who cross-dressed to perform male and female yakuza roles. By the late 1960s, they had been replaced by increasingly sexualized figures, and later by the ‘pink’ violence of the ‘girl boss’ sub-genre. Yet masculine themes in the ‘nihilistic’ yakuza films of the late 1960s and 1970s have been the focus of most scholarship on the genre, with scant attention paid to the female yakuza film. This article offers an iconographic reading of the heroines of the yakuza genre, arguing that the re-imagining of a postwar ‘Japaneseness’ was conducted as much through the yakuza genre’s heroines as its heroes. Through analysis of key visual motifs, narrative tropes, and star personae, the image of the female yakuza can be read as a commentary on social conditions in postwar Japan. We can see the rapid social and political changes of postwar Japan reflected and mediated through the changing image of the female yakuza heroine during the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s

Archive of Darkness:William Kentridge's Black Box/Chambre Noire

Situating itself in histories of cinema and installation art, William Kentridge's Black Box/Chambre Noire (2005) raises questions about screens, exhibition space, site-specificity and spectatorship. Through his timely intervention in a debate on Germany’s colonial past, Kentridge’s postcolonial art has contributed to the recognition and remembrance of a forgotten, colonial genocide. This article argues that, by transposing his signature technique of drawings for projection onto a new set of media, Kentridge explores how and what we can know through cinematic projection in the white cube. In particular, his metaphor of the illuminated shadow enables him to animate archival fragments as shadows and silhouettes. By creating a multi-directional archive, Black Box enables an affective engagement with the spectres of colonialism and provides a forum for the calibration of moral questions around reparation, reconciliation and forgiveness

From Nordic gloom to Nordic cool : producing genre film for the global markets

Expanding on historical criticisms of genre production in Nordic cinema, which have tended to align genre with commercialism and/or unfair competition from imported productions in Nordic domestic markets, Kääpä’s chapter explores contemporary production strategies within the context of festival circuits, online platforms, and international professional distribution networks. In exploring these networks, Kääpä focuses on the transnational joint venture Nordic Genre Invasion, which acts as both a PR platform for seventeen companies and as a talent pool for sourcing co-production arrangements. Other factors Kääpä considers in this success are the “Scandiboom” generated by the high profile of Nordic noir and the role of regional production organizations, such as the Nordic Film and Television Institute. Ultimately, he argues, these factors contribute to an emerging regional film culture that utilizes a range of transnational coproduction and distribution strategies that increasingly revolve around genre